The red and blue and white lights from the wheels and coasters play on the black
water as it rolls inshore past the pilings. In the dark, from a distance, the rides
all look like pieces of the same machine: a moving, glittering Rube Goldberg contraption
producing shrieks and laughs and music.
The pier looked just as bright and loud forty years ago, but back then, I never
looked at it from a distance. Back then, I was always inside the machine. Every
kid I knew spent time in the machine.
§
It’s that time when we’re all out there on the dusky streets, dog tugging
at the end of a leash in one hand, a poop bag rustling in the other. I saw him across
the street, big guy, big hands, arms filling his sleeves to bursting, still in dusty
work twills and muddy Frankenstein work boots. At the end of his leash, a little
white fluff leading him, showing him when to stop, then waiting for him to grunt
down in a tired squat to pick up the mess.
He saw me looking, he smiled, I smiled—we’re in the same union,
brother—and we each walked on.
§
On Sundays, I always stop by the lottery counter before doing the groceries. Sometimes
Cat is with me. When she is, I say, “For luck,” and she kisses my new
tickets.
She kisses them a little peck, but it’s not for luck I think. That little
half-pucker is like what she used to do as a baby just learning to kiss. It’s
not for luck. I like to think it’s for me.
We don’t win, we never win, but that’s ok. It’s something we do.
§
“I’ve been thinking,” her mother said.
Whenever she said something like that—“I have an idea,” “You
know what might be nice? Might be fun?”—the hair on my neck went up.
Whatever it was, it was something I wasn’t going to think was nice or fun
or a good idea.
“We should do something special for our next vacation.”
Yep, there it was, right there in the way she hit special.
At that point, I knew I was supposed to express some interest, some eager curiosity.
Any other option would only put off the inevitable. But if all I could buy was a
20-minute reprieve, I was going to take it.
“Hold that thought, sweetie,” I said, and gave her a quick kiss on the
top of her head as I passed. “I think the dog has to go out.”
§
The coaster, they called it the Wild Mouse when I was a kid, I only rode it then
and haven’t been on it since. Later, it was the Jet Star but it was the same
thing. Now, it’s debris. Some latticework and a piece of rail out in the surf.
The rest—the pier, the boardwalk, the big machine once filled with shrieking
kids—out there in the ocean somewhere.
A piece of me washed out to sea with it.
is an adjunct instructor at several colleges and universities in his native New
Jersey, and is also a student in the Creative Writing MFA program at Fairleigh Dickinson
University. He is currently working on a history of Home Box Office for McFarland
Publishing; and his collection of essays, Idols, Icons, and Illusions: The
Movies We Love—and Love to Hate—and the People Who Made Them,
will be published by Stephen F. Austin University Press early next year.
